Happy Stories, Mostly

In their stunning fiction debut, queer Indonesian writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu blends together speculative fiction and dark absurdism, drawing from Batak and Christian cultural elements.Longlisted for the International Booker Prize, Happy Stories, Mostly introduces "one of the most important Indonesian writers today" (Litro Magazine). These twelve short stories ask what it means to be almost happy--to nearly find joy, to sort-of be accepted, but to never fully grasp one's desire. Joy shimmers on the horizon, just out of reach.An employee navigates their new workplace, a department of Heaven devoted to archiving unanswered prayers; a tourist in Vietnam seeks solace following her son's suicide; a young student befriends a classmate obsessed with verifying the existence of a mythical hundred-foot-tall man. A tragicomic collection that probes the miraculous, melancholy nature of survival amid loneliness, Happy Stories, Mostly considers an oblique approach to human life: In the words of one of the stories' narrators, "I work in the dark. Like mushrooms. I don't need light to thrive."

Autorentext
Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a Toba Batak poet and translator. Their first poetry collection 'Sergius Mencari Bacchus' won the first prize on the 2015 Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Manuscript Competition. Its English translation by Tiffany Tsao won a PEN Translates award and was published in the UK with Tilted Axis Press. Their collection of short stories 'Happy Stories, Mostly' (tr. Tiffany Tsao) won the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses and was listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize, the 2023 National Translation Award for Prose, the 2023 Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation. Among their accolades are the inaugural Patricia Kailis International Writing Fellowship and Southeast Asia Literary Council's Sastrawan Muda. They are Harvard University Asia Center's 2023-2024 Artist in Residence. Tiffany Tsao is a translator and novelist. Her translations of Indonesian literary work have been awarded the PEN Translation Prize and NSW Premier's Translation Prize. Her novel The Majesties was longlisted for the Ned Kelly Award. She has a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley.

Klappentext
A blend of science fiction, absurdism and alternative-historical realism, Happy Stories, Mostly is a collection of twelve stories that queer the norm. A powerful puff of fresh air, the stories talk to each other as pieces of a larger whole, but with crucial facts - the saddest ones, the happiest ones - omitted, forgotten, unbearable.